Empire lies at the core of American identity

At the beginning of the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld stated on television that Americans don't "do" empire.

This is an historical interpretation based on certain assumptions derived from American exceptionalism. Europe has empires; the US has an anti-colonial tradition stemming from the American Revolution. Yes, the occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1946 did occur, but as an aberration.

Ignorance of the US's deeply entrenched imperial experiences starts with a legalistic definition of empire as formal, political control of territory. European empires are said to have had such arrangements routinely, and the United States has not. This in itself is erroneous as fact. It fully describes neither many European empires, nor the American case.

The United States is manifestly an empire because it has exerted power over other people; it has occupied other countries (repeatedly), changed their political regimes and fought wars that have given it the control of the territory of others, especially in 1848 and 1898. It has sought to influence other peoples indirectly as well. While we can argue over what kind of an empire it is or was, we should be beyond debates over whether it is or is not.

Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, are some of the countries invaded, occupied, and indeed ruled, for varying periods; direct intervention in the Caribbean was particularly heavy from 1898 to 1934. But the US empire's impacts were hardly unknown before or since.

One can play parlour games that make the past seem like the present, and show the US always to have been imperial in the same way. But empire can only be understood historically as a changing system. It has been a moving target that even historians have found it difficult to keep up.

Historians have divided American empire into:

the continental to 1890s, including the wars against the Indians;

the formal or island empire acquired from 1898, such as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa;

the "informal empire" demanding foreign lands be open to American goods (the "Open Door"), and the economic coercion of "dollar diplomacy";

the empire of mass consumption exported since the 1920s that we call Fordism;

the so-called "empire by invitation" of the Marshall plan and the defence of free Europe in the Cold War;

the current "full-spectrum dominance".

Documenting American empire has been done by US historians for a century. Studying US imperialism is not new, and books about American empire are commonplace - this raises the question of historical amnesia. Part of the amnesia stems from school textbooks that continue to ply the standard line. In addition, identities deeply rooted in educational and family experience resist taking American empire as core to American experience. As part of this forgetting, a material stake in empire encourages denial. Many Americans have benefited, in cheaper prices for primary products, and in military-induced industrial and technological development since 1950.

One theme in the process of memory's erasure is how American empire is blurred by the market economy turning resources into commodities, and in the process, extending empire's ecological footprint. Americans have defined their national identity as the pursuit of freedom. In the 20th century, that has been increasingly interpreted as freedom to consume, based upon substituting cheap resources for labour through prodigious use of energy. We speak of abundance as a shaping theme in American historiography, based on a rich "frontier" - but much of that abundance since the 1920s has increasingly derived from other people.

The effects of 9/11 have been to consolidate trends in the exertion of American power and its distinctive technological warfare in the 1990s. Vast opportunities have opened up, not only in Iraq. The US now has even more bases around the world - in fact over 700. And the US will not be leaving Iraq, no matter who wins in November. Too much attention is given to differences between Democrats and the Republicans, and too little to how public debate on Iraq is centred on how best to project American power.

Certainly in an economic sense, American power is declining, slowly and unevenly, but Rome was neither built in a day nor destroyed in one. The United States is still the world's most powerful country and is systemically connected to the global economy. It is less likely than ever that the rest of the world can avoid being affected. The United States uses 23 percent of the world's energy, produces 30 per cent of the world's GDP, and is the third largest country by both geographical size and population. Its military spending is larger than the next 20 countries combined. Its empire is not going to disappear, and deeper knowledge of these traditions is vital subjects for discussion.

Ian Tyrrell is Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. This is an extract of a speech he will deliver at the university on October 8, 2008.